Lexual Favors · 12:58am May 15th, 2012
Okay, what the hell, let's try something.
One of the life-lessons I'm starting to take away from my experience in the "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" fan community is that if you have a large group of enthusiastic people, and you tell them to do something positive, they will respond by going off and doing something positive. I'm not going to pretend that I'm trying to build a clinic in Uganda here, but maybe we can start something good.
Because... there's a downside to having a large group of enthusiastic people, too: the resulting creative output is all just too much to process. How many stories are on FiMFiction.net alone? Well, I've run the numbers. The total number of stories on this site is exactly EIGHTY MILLION BILLION GAJILLION, and I've double-checked that sum, so please don't embarrass yourself questioning me. Aha, says the clever fanbase, in response to this gobsmackingly, brain-turn-offingly huge number. We will create blogs like Equestria Daily, a community effort to try and elevate the best we have to offer. We will create automated processes like the Feature Box, using algorithms to highlight the most popular and provocative. These methods will have their upsides and their downsides, but we will try our best.
Well, how about we try something else, too?
If you've posted a story on this site, you probably know the experience of having a perfectly good story swallowed up by the sheer volume of other perfectly good stories out there. If you haven't, you probably have at least seen a perfectly good story get swallowed up. It's frustrating to have something you've sunk time, effort, sweat and tears into get shoved off the front page in a matter of hours, never to be seen again.
So here's the deal: Y'all have user-blogs. Make use of them. If you enjoyed "...Feature Box", or hell, even if you didn't and are reading this later, please consider taking a moment of your time to look at your list of favorite stories on this site, and find one that really, really, really could use some extra loving, a good solid Lexual Favor A story that just didn't hit the post timing right, or had the misfortune of being posted alongside a bunch of really other cool stories, or whatever. Then, take your aforementioned blog, and tell people how much you liked it. Include a link. You can go into detail as to why this story makes you feel all tingly, but you don't have to. And if you see one of these posts on the reader side of things... give it a shot. You've done stupider things. Sometimes you've even paid money to do them. You can do this.
tl;dr The Feature Box isn't the only way to raise the signal-to-noise ratio around here. You can do it yourself, by breaking the silence and talking about your favorite author a little. It'll only take a minute. And it'll feel reeeallly good. For both of you.
My pet Lexual Favor, as you'll know if you were reading this blog a couple days ago, is Via Equestria. Have a lexual favor, CouchCrusader.
This is an interesting point, yet, I don't really see how they help.
Well I have my 5 faves for completed fics on this site alone on my user page. All but 1 of them are slightly to moderately popular, with one being quite popular.
I also have the 5+1 fics I have provided creative input on at the authors' request posted up there.
Most of the fics I read on this site are already featured on EqD so I'm not sure how big a boost a blogpost to my 9 watchers would provide...
Couldn't hurt though, right?
There are quite a few fics that could use more love.
Most of us have blogs that no one reads. I do know some stories on FimFiction that deserve more attention:
- Near Death Experience, by Hadles
- Moonspire Run - tho I hear this was on EqD and got some love there
- The Old Stories by Thanqol - tho this is permanently featured on ponyfictionarchive, so it's probably well-known elswhere
I'm building a recommendation system that will recommend stories to you based on your favorites. I'll announce it on my blog when it's done.
dl.dropbox.com/u/31471793/FiMFiction/Twilight_Sparkle_lolface.png
AHAHAHA. That makes like 2 signal boosts I've gotten in the past week or so. Skywriter, please continue rocking on as hard as you do, even when I don't respond to your comments :(
I'll try and have something more eloquent and fulfilling to say to you when I'm off work tonight. Thank you so much!
Sounds like somepony is feeling a bit of guilt at just how thoroughly he was able to game the FimFiction.net and thereafter the EQD recommendation systems.
(Not that you don't totally deserve all the attention you're getting with ...Feature Box. But part of me thinks it's a shame that one ended up being so popular compared to, say, Heretical Fictions.)
In any case, I like the idea you've put forward, and will be following suit this week, even though I know that my audience is miniscule.
It's an interesting problem, trying to give the stories that truly "deserve it" the spotlight. As cynical as it was, I think AbsoluteAnonymous' recent blog post about how to get featured on FimFiction was entirely on the money about many things, including what the pony fan base is really after.
And I'm not guiltless here as well: Sometimes I want something as moving, long, and emotionally involved as Eternal that is going to be in my head for weeks afterward, toying with my whole world view... but other times I want a lighthearted bit of relatively unsurprising and certainly unchallenging fluff. Honestly, as horrible as this is, sometimes I want to read through a beginning author's stumbling attempts at their first fiction ever, with all its Mary Sues, lack of plot, smorgasbord of grammar and spelling errors and other problems-- just so that I feel more confident about my own ability to write when I sit down and try to make progress on my own stories. (I'm ashamed of it, but I will admit that I have a weird love-hate relationship with some of the best works I've read. I love them because I feel awe-inspired and moved by them-- they are truly able to reach down into my most private self and shake things up a bit. And I hate them because I feel like I will never achieve that level of awesomeness and am horribly jealous.)
One of the biggest problems with any rating system is defining exactly what "good" is. And one of the major problems I see with all the sites I've seen which attempt to solve this problem in any way (be it totally automated, as in the case of FimFiction; or involving a large amount of human labor, and an excellent team of pre-readers, as in the case of EQD) is that they try to answer this question too one-dimensionally. It's my opinion that because "good" can mean many things to many different people, and even to the same person at different times... the most functionally-complete rating / recommendation system needs to reflect this somehow.
Obviously, this is a hard problem to solve... especially if one wants to make the interface to finding what's "good" for me right now actually usable by the average reader.
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I'd be really interested in seeing what you come up with here. While I'm pretty sure just about any automated system can be gamed, or will necessarily show the biases inherent in the design, I think there's still a ton of room for interesting innovations here. I really wish FimFiction.net had a dozen or more different ways to connect "good" works with readers interested in reading them.
Alright, I'll give it a shot.
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Why, SR, you speak as though I'm a neurotic, guilt-ridden wreck even on my best days. I can hardly conceive of a universe like that.
Oh, right, that's this universe. Sorry.
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Hehe! <3 you, Channing.
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Seriously, though. You shouldn't feel guilty. Despite how limburger-cheese-stench green I am with envy sometimes at your seemingly effortless ability to pull this kind of thing off, as small as the pony-loving, fanfiction writing and reading community is, we need more of people like you! Especially since you choose to use your mutant attention-gathering powers for good.
It is a laudable thing to be able to connect with other people, whether that be on a deep level that makes them alter their whole personal cosmology slightly, making them better people for having had that contact; or in a lighthearted way that just makes them laugh so much they're three guffaws short of complete loss of bladder control (which also makes them better people for having had that contact, IMO). So really: You should enjoy the spotlight because you have earned it and because you are making people's lives better!
"Now," says your insatiable audience. "What else ya got?"
I've thought of doing that before, but I've never written anything, so I don't think anyone really visits my page to notice anything I have to say.
I've thought for a while that there ought to be a group specifically for under-appreciated stories, good stories that just didn't get noticed. Probably with tiers, one folder for stories with less than 200 views, next for 201-350, then 351-500, 501-750, maybe up to 1000, then a folder for stories that have "graduated" beyond those folders if the group ever actually got functioning well and generating views for the stories there.
The problem is, I know nothing about how the groups here work, and I worry that it would either end up getting filled with stories that honestly aren't that good, so people wouldn't bother using the group, or else efforts to enforce a quality control would create more hard feelings.
But yeah, I do know of one story that had a promising start, but which I'm pretty sure was abandoned because the author was disappointed it never even reached 200 views: Not Quite BFFs I tried plugging it once before, but I don't think my efforts gained it even one extra view.
And then a one-shot I found funnier than most, written from a fairly unique perspective, but still sits at 154 views: A Day In The Life Of Opalescence